I started undergrad in international business, but felt like something was missing. Hackathons were picking up momentum, design thinking was finding its way into every classroom, and it turned out that the way I think in visuals, my fondness for motion, and having the personality that pulls people in were things technology needed most. That’s when I started taking design classes, teaching myself as I built a data analytics startup as the founding product designer, and learning firsthand how human-centered design tackles the hardest problems in healthcare and enterprise during my internship at IDEO.

A couple of things:

• Contribute to vision for how users interact with AI across AWS Quick, thinking through what next-generation human-AI interaction looks and feels in an enterprise setting with security, data connectivity, and business productivity in mind.
• Design how AI connects to the rest of the enterprise productivity suite, so AI features feel like a natural extension of existing workflows rather than something bolted on.
• Extend the core experience to different surfaces including browser, Slack, Teams, and M365 Office, so the product meets users where they already work.
• Work closely with PMs and engineers to make prioritization calls, figuring out what gets built now, what gets deferred, and how to protect the experience within real constraints.
• Inform design explorations with actual product metrics and user feedback

The hardest part of working in AI right now is that everyone can make things. Vibe coding has lowered the barrier to building so significantly that engineers, PMs, and designers are all prototyping in parallel, often in different directions, without a shared understanding of what we're actually trying to solve. Getting everyone back into the same room with the same mental model takes great effort.

AI has made us more productive, but it has also raised the bar for what's expected. Because spinning up a prototype is so fast now, there's an assumption that vision work should move at the same speed. The workload shifted upward. We're expected to produce more exploratory, speculative work on top of everything else, because the cost of making something looks lower from the outside than it actually is.

Slack for quick alignments, Zoom for feedback sessions and major decision points, Figma for design concepts, deep dives, and documentation. Jitter to demonstrate interactivity quickly, and vibe coding platforms for broad explorations or high-fidelity motion prototypes where I want to tap into front-end libraries to get the prototype details right.

Start with your hands. Before you open Figma, before you vibe code, before you reach for any tool, sketch it out. Paper forces you to think about intention before execution. Tools are seductive because they make things look really fast. But looking real and being right are different things. Every tool has a purpose, and knowing which one to reach for and when is its own skill.

I can't think of any for now. Despite the collective concern around AI slop, about automation, about the design bar being raised when anyone can generate a baseline interface, I still enjoy the creative expression and the thrill of doing the hard thing. I still think being a designer is cool.

I stay close to the startup scene to keep my sense of what's technically possible. I explore illustration and motion work outside the corporate design world because to remind what craft feels like without constraints. I try to use new products and apps and talk to other designers regularly.